Category Archives: Reading

“The Internet”: Part poem, part meditative salve

20 Wednesday Jun 2012

Posted by in Life, Memory, Reading

≈ 1 Comment

An interesting claim, don’t you think, calling the Internet “part poem, part meditative salve”? At first I was going to start by telling you that the Internet referred to in the title isn’t the Internet, the global computer network through which you have reached this blog post, but, in a way, it is. You see, the title of this post refers to an essay entitled “The Internet,” written by Lisa Schamess and published in the inaugural issue of TOSKA Magazine last Friday.1 While it was Lisa’s friend Kevin McMamara who called her essay “Part poem, part meditative salve,” Lisa, I think, would argue that our shared global computer network is “Part poem, part meditative salve.”

The essay is one of her memoir pieces, and those are always hard for me, have always been hard for me, for a number of reasons. They’re hard for me because they focus on the 13 months between the birth of Miss Mo, Lisa’s daughter, and the death of Gil, Lisa’s husband. At first I found them difficult because Lisa has always been a real person to me, a friend whose writing I began reading because she was a friend, and so the struggles and difficulties and pain and loss she writes of have never been experiences of a stranger but of someone I cared about. And now there’s lots of layers. With each new piece I learn more about a pivotal event in the life of the woman I shall marry in 25 days, and I learn more about the man whose daughter I am raising, a daughter, I’m realizing, I will soon have been actively parenting longer than he was able to. They’re hardest on me, though, because while Lisa has made peace with her past, I feel an intense need to reach out and comfort the woman she was 12 years ago, a woman I wouldn’t even know for another 5 years, a woman who is very real and is very much in need of comfort. I want her to be spared from that pain and loss. I want her to have the life with her husband and her daughter denied to her. And much of my reaction is rooted in the fact that I love her so deeply. There’s no easy way to navigate that.

“The Internet” is different from her other memoir pieces, though. Different than pieces like “Light & Shadow” or “House of Memory” or the unpublished pieces that are making up the memoir. It is part poem, part meditative salve. It’s also got force to it. I want to say it has an edge. It does, but it’s not all edge. Somehow Lisa’s made some of the gentlest parts hard and the hardest parts gentle. It’s an attempt to capture and share something that can’t be captured and shared. It’s not quite like anything I’ve read by her. While “Light & Shadow” and “House of Memory” are my favorite published pieces, “The Internet” surpasses them as a work of art. And it is very much a work of art.

But don’t just listen to me. I’m biased. I mean, I am marrying her. You could also say that her friends and my friends are biased, and they are, but in sharing her essay on Facebook last Friday, they didn’t need add comments like these: “This is big in all the beautiful ways that matter”;2 “Sad, sexy, sweet and smart. Read it”;3 and “Brilliant, clever, and painful – the kind of writing that stays in my head long after I’ve read it.”4 I could go on, but I won’t. I think you’ve got the idea. So just read it and find out for yourself how the Internet and “The Internet” are part poem and part meditative salve.

And take a look at the rest of TOSKA while you’re at it. They’ve produced a good inaugural issue. It’s worth reading and they are worth following.

  1. Yes, yes, yes, Lisa is my fiancée. As I’ve said before, I was a huge fan and promoter of her writing long before I had any clue I’d be marrying her. [↩]
  2. Bernard Balizet  [↩]
  3. Tammy Seltzer [↩]
  4. Liza Potts [↩]

What I’m Looking Forward to Reading, Pt. 2

27 Sunday Jun 2010

Posted by in Charles Stross, Cognitive Studies, Digital Studies/New Media, Memory, Reading, Science Fiction/Fantasy

≈ 2 Comments

And here’s part 2. Another mix of academic and non-academic.

Your Memory: How It Works & How to Improve It, Kenneth L. Higbee

  • Higbee is a Brigham Young U psychologist who pioneered a college course on memory improvement. Part crash course in memory theory and part crash course into practical mnemotechniques, I’m interested in this book specifically because it’s what I don’t want my scholarship to be. I’m not interested in arguing that we should all be trained in mnemotechniques but to get us to rethink the role of memory in what we do and to recognize mnemonic practices as mnemonic practices so that we can actively engage them as memoria. No one needs to be told that the peg mnemonic and link stories are mnemonic practices and people like Higbee are far more qualified in teaching you how to learn and apply them.
  • This isn’t to say that I’m not looking for connections between practical mnemotechniques and what I’m focusing on. I am, and that’s one of the reasons why I’m reading this book. I’m also reading this book because I got interested in memory because mine is so bad. Long, long ago, anting to improve my memory, l asked someone if they could recommend a book on memory improvement. They told me that Mary Carruthers’ The Book of Memory had a translation of a memory treatise I might find interesting. While it didn’t give me the advice I needed to improve my memory, I got much more out of it than either of us could have imagined. Any way, part of the reason I’m reading Your Memory is that I’m still hoping to improve my memory.

Pump Six and Other Stories, Paolo Bagigalupi

  • A collection of eleven Bagigalupi stories that contains “The Calorie Man” and “The Yellow Card Man,” stories I mention in my earlier discussion of The Windup Girl. Having read two and one of Bagigalupi’s novels, I’m looking forward to this collection.
  • As I mention in my earlier post, while the book is out of print until this fall, you can buy an electronic version in a wide number of formats.

The Secret History of Science Fiction, Ed. James Patrick Kelly and John Kessel

  • A couple of stories I’ve read before and a large number of stories I have not. The goal of this collection is to present sf stories that call into question the sf/mainstream fiction divide. The collection is, in part, a response to Jonathan Lethem’s June 1998 Village Voice essay “Close Encounters: The Squandered Promise of Science Fiction.” The collection begins with two epigraphs, one from Gene Wolfe: “Realistic fiction leaves out far, far too much. How old is realistic fiction? How old is fantasy?”
  • This issue is also taken up by Tom Shippey from time to time, such as in the introduction to J.R.R. Tolkien: Author of the Century, Tom Shippey, as part of his discussion of the high literature (Bloomsbury modernism) vs. popular genre fiction (Tolkien, Lewis, etc.), he quotes a publisher who stated that only fantasy is mainstream and that everything else is genre. Shippey’s discussion is in response to the British literati panicking when The Lord of the Rings won the top place in Waterstone’s Book of the Century poll. Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm took second and third place with Joyce’s Ulysses coming in fourth. We in America often don’t know just how vicious or deep the Bloomsbury modernism vs. Tolkien/Lewis divide was. As Shippey explains, Tolkien and Lewis lost the Oxbridge academic wars, but they won the heart of the reading public.

The Fuller Memorandum, Charles Stross / The Laundry RPG, Gareth Hanrahan, Jason Durall, and John Snead

  • Long-time readers know that Charles Stross is one of my favorite authors and know that his Laundry series holds a special place in my heart. July 6 brings the latest installment in the adventures of Bob Howard.
  • As I explain in my earlier post on The Laundry RPG (see the “Laundry series” link in the bullet point above), while I don’t role-play any more—although I want to get back into it, anyone interested in trying to do a skype/Google Wave/other online communication technology to do some RPGing?—I do on occasion still buy role-playing games/rule books to read for fun. This is mostly limited to Ars Magica material, but I’m going to make an exception for this. (Back when I was playing Ars Magica, John Nephew, President of Ars Magica‘s publisher, mentioned on an email discussion list that he stops work and heads to a coffee shop when the new issue of Speculum, the journal of the Medieval Academy of America, shows up at the office.)

Digital Literacy for Technical Communication: 21st Century Theory and Practice, Ed. Rachel Spilka

  • I’m teaching the introductory technical communication class this fall, the first time I’ve taught one in a number of years, and on the horizon is some work on defining technological literacy as awareness (a McLuhanesque approach that emerged as I wrote my technological literacy autobiography), so this book fulfills a couple of academic needs.

What I’m Looking Forward to Reading, Pt. 1

26 Saturday Jun 2010

Posted by in Cognitive Studies, Marshall McLuhan, Reading, Science Fiction/Fantasy

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Having done a recent reading roundup, I know you’re all dying to know what’s in my immediate reading future, so, without further ado:

The Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, Ed. Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr.

  • Currently reading. Yes, I do actually read scholarship. 😉 While I am afraid of getting lost in metaphor theory, as I explained, I can’t avoid it. I actually wrote that post knowing this book was in my immediate future.
  • So far, I’m enjoying it, although I’m being very careful to not read it from cover to cover right now. Too many fascinating essays on too many fascinating topics. Right now, I’m limiting myself to “The neural theory of metaphor” (George Lakoff), “Philosophy’s debt to metaphor” (Mark Johnson), “Rethinking metaphor” (Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner), “How metaphors create categories—quickly” (Sam Glucksberg), Metaphor as structure-mapping” (Dedre Gentner and Brian Bowdle), “Metaphor in education” (Graham Low), and “Metaphor in picture and multimodal representations” (Charles Forceville).

Stories: All-New Tales, Ed. Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio

  • Neil Gaiman and Al Sarrantonio contacted a number of authors and asked them for new stories that “used a lightning-flash of magic as a way of showing us something we have already seen a thousand times as if we have never seen it at all.” They wanted stories, as Gaiman explains in his introduction, that invoked the four words Gaiman suggested should be written on the wall of a children’s section of a library: “…and then what happened?” (A librarian asked Gaiman for his suggestion.)
  • I’ve read the first few. Good stuff. I’d heard Gaiman say that the first story, Roddy Doyle’s vampire story “Blood,” was unlike no other vampire story you’ve ever read. I think something like “turns the genre on its head” or something like that was said. He’s right.

Saga of the Swamp Thing Book Three, Alan Moore et. al.

  • As I’ve explained, I’m looking forward to reading the end of Alan Moore’s Swamp Thing run and see the debut of John Constantine. On June 29, everything else goes on hold. 🙂

Marshall McLuhan Unbound, Marshall McLuhan

  • The Medium is the Massage, which regular readers will know I often teach, is in many ways comparable to Walter Ong’s Orality and Literacy. Both are surveys that skim the surface of their subject, maps to give you a sense of the territory rather than comprehensive and definitive accounts. As a collection of McLuhan’s essays that circle around his books. As the promotional material explains, “Some were written after the book and encapsulate major themes; some set out additional discoveries or matters left out of the book; some present material discovered as a result of writing the book.”
  • In reading these, I’m looking for further insight into McLuhan, for essay-length pieces I can give to students to supplement The Medium of the Massage, and, eventually, readings for a class I want to someday teach on McLuhan and Ong, which I’ll title “The Prophet and the Priest: something, something, something.”

Recent Reading, Pt. 2

25 Friday Jun 2010

Posted by in Comics/Anime/Manga, Reading, Science Fiction/Fantasy

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While I called Pt. 1 my recent adventures in fiction, most of this post is about non fiction. In fact, I read most of it for academic reasons.

Zot!: The Complete Black and White Collection, Scott McCloud

  • Okay, well, Zot! is fiction and I did read for fun. Best known for his Understanding Comics, Reinventing Comics, and Making Comics books, all of which I’ve read, Zot! is a comic series that McCloud wrote before he wrote those books. Set in both the America of the late 1980s/early 1990s and “‘the far-flung future of 1965,’ a utopian Earth of world peace, robot butlers, and flying cars,” Zot! is the story of the interaction of two teenagers, one from each of the two alternate realities. The complete collection includes commentary by McCloud, which includes discussions of his struggles writing a comic series and how they lead to his writing Understanding Comics. Well worth reading.

Comics and Sequential Art and Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative, Will Eisner

  • The first two of Will Eisner’s trilogy of “how to” books—the third is Expressive Anatomy for Comics and Narrative—these two I did read for academic purposes. Since McCloud’s books, especially Understanding Comics, have become required reading for visual rhetoric, I thought I’d take a look books he builds up from. In going through these, I’m looking more for student readings than theory, and for my purposes, they provide a bit of both, especially Comics and Sequential Art. I also hope to teach a comics/graphic novel course some day, and as when I teach science fiction and fantasy courses, I want to include theory to help foreground how the genre differs from the fiction they’ve been taught to read throughout most of their schooling. Obviously, these are essential books from that perspective.
  • While good, I found them less accessible than Scott McCloud’s books, maybe because these are “textbooks” that emerged from Eisner’s teaching at New York’s School of Visual Arts. They’re full of examples from Eisner’s own comics and graphic novels, mainly A Contract with God, The Spirit, and Life on another Planet. For the casual reader or those interested in getting started in comics theory, I’d suggest McCloud’s Understanding Comics first.
  • And no, I’m not looking to break into comics. I am, however, working on learning how to draw and cartoon so that I can create graphic syllabi and outcomes maps. (Think concept maps and mind mapping applied to representing the organization, schedule of topics, and learning outcomes of a course.” If accepted, I’ll discuss my use of these in terms of rhetorical memory and delivery at next year’s CCCC. In addition to creating a graphic syllabus and outcomes map for the course, I’m planning on creating an outcomes map for each of the major writing projects in the first-year comp classes I teach next year.)

The Jesuit Guide to (Almost) Everything, James Martin

  • Another read for academic purposes, I picked this up to better understand Jesuit spirituality and the Ignatian Way, partly to better understand its influence on Walter Ong’s scholarship; partly to better understand the Spiritual Exercises, an ongoing living tradition that is rooted in monastic rhetoric; and partly to better understand how to fulfill my role as a professor at a Jesuit University. (( I discuss a bit of this back in August 2008 when I talk about writing the “Statement of Understanding of the interrelated Missions of the University and College of Arts and Sciences” as part of my application/interview process with Creighton.
  • It’s an excellent book. Funny, accessible, and informative, and not written just for Catholics or Christians.

The Android’s Dream, John Scalzi

  • Another fiction book, and an enjoyable one at that. I briefly mentioned it earlier this year. Scalzi calls it his “‘popcorn movie’ book: No particularly deep themes, just lots of action and adventure and fun.” While not as philosophical as Philip K. Dick’s Do Andriod’s Dream of Electric Sheep, it does, as I note in that earlier post, as (in part) a homage to that book, it does touch on some of the same themes and issues. As Scalzi says, it’s full of action, adventure, and fun.
  • Hmmm, you want a synopsis of the plot, do you? Okay. It’s about a low-level diplomat in Earth’s State Department—a guy who specializes in delivering bad news—who has to save the day after a high-level diplomat murders his alien counterpart, a representative of a far more advanced civilization that wouldn’t mind taking over earth.

Recent Reading, Pt. 1

24 Thursday Jun 2010

Posted by in Comics/Anime/Manga, Reading

≈ 4 Comments

Not sure I’ll ever blog as regularly about my media consumption as Brendan does, but I like his posts, so I thought I’d do this roundup of some recent reading. I wanted to call this my non-academic reading, but with me, you never know what becomes academic reading, so let’s call it a roundup of my recent adventures in fiction.

Saga of the Swamp Thing, Alan Moore et. al.

  • About 20 months ago, I started plowing through the Hellblazer comics and I picked up Books 1 and 2 of Saga of the Swamp Thing, the hardback rerelease of Alan Moore’s run with the Swamp Thing, mostly to see John Constantine‘s origins. As Book 3 isn’t released until next week, I haven’t encountered Constantine yet, but it’s Alan Moore, so I expected it to be good. It is.
  • While billed as horror, it’s much closer to Lovecraft than Stephen King. Getting academic here, I’d say it’s dark fantasy/Gothic fantasy rather than mainstream horror, which suits me just fine as I like dark fantasy but don’t like mainstream horror.
  • It was interesting to see how Moore placed the series within the larger DC (superhero) universe while separating it from the DC universe at the same time. Much more overt than what Neil Gaiman did with The Sandman, but also more artful, I think. The Justice League shows up in issue 24: “Roots,”realizing that they’ve dropped the ball and may not be able to confront the threat before them. Green Arrow puts it like this, “Man I don’t believe this! We were watching out for New York, for Metropolis, for Atlantis but who was watching out for Lacroix, Louisiana?” At the end of the issue, after the Swamp Thing has done his job, Green Lantern asks, “What happened out here?” and Superman replies, “I don’t know. Let’s just be grateful that there’s something watching out for the places no one watches out for.” And that’s it for the costumed ones.
  • I could have finished off Moore’s run by buying volumes 5 & 6, but having started with the new hardbacks, I’m waiting for Book 3, which has the two volumes together. I’m looking forward to next week.

Crooked Little Vein, Warren Ellis

  • I picked up Crooked Little Vein because I’d enjoyed Ellis’ Transmetropolitan comic series (see below), and it was a fun read: the story, the writing, and the medium. (It was the first novel I read on the iPad.)
  • It’s a profane, dark comedy/detective/political novel about a down-and-out private detective hired to find and retrieve the “other Constitution of the United States” which “details the real intent of [the Founders’] design for American society.”
  • To give you a sense of the writing, here’s one of my favorite passages, a description of the other Constitution itself:

    It is a small, handwritten volume reputed bound in the skin of the extraterrestrial entity that plagued Benjamin Franklin’s ass over six nights in Paris during his European travels. Benjamin Franklin wasn’t some nancy-boy novelist who wrote sensitive books about aliens sticking things up his rectum, you know. On the seventh night he got right up and killed the little bastard with one punch.

Spook Country, William Gibson

  • Not having enjoyed Gibson’s three previous books, Idoru, All Tomorrow’s Parties and Pattern Recognition, nearly as much as the first four, I held off on reading this one for a few years. It also took me a number of times to get into it: for some reason, I had some difficulty getting past the first few pages. It was the first book I bought on the iPad, so after a few months of dithering, I decided to read it despite the fact it wasn’t doing it for me, or least make a good effort at trying to do so. I’m glad I did. I think it’s Gibson’s best since Virtual Light and it’s got me looking forward to the release of Zero History later this year.
  • Part of the Bigend books (along with Pattern Recognition), it’s science fiction thinking applied to the present rather than to the near future, what he has called “speculative fiction of the very recent past.”
  • After reading this, I decided to get a hold of the Gibson documentary No Map for these Territories, which I watched Tuesday night. I enjoyed that as well and kept thinking I’d love to show clips of Gibson talking about recent social/cultural changes brought about by technology as I teach McLuhan.
  • After reading this book and watching No Map, I’m beginning to wonder if my problem with the three previous books is rooted in me as a reader wanting Gibson to write like he had in the past rather than allowing him to mature as a writer. If that’s the case, then I’m probably maturing as a reader. And now I’m asking my self, what the hell does that mean?

The Windup Girl, Paolo Bacigalupi

  • I first came across Bacigalupi when I read “The Calorie Man” in Rewired: The Post-Cyberpunk Anthology, an excellent “biopunk” short story that scared the hell out of me with it’s dystopian, post-petroleum world in which Midwest agribusinesses used bioterrorism to control the world’s food supply and calories have become currency. It scared the hell out of me because it’s an all too possible future, what with agribusinesses patenting the genomes of conventional plants and animals and seeking to replace agriculture with bioengineered seeds and suing farmers for doing things like saving and replanting these genetically modified seeds. [Note: I stated college with the intent of being a biochemistry/English double major with the career goal of being a genetic engineer/science fiction writer, so I have no problem with genetic engineering or genetically modified food per se.] The Windup Girl is set in this same world.
  • I highly recommend The Windup Girl. It’s a great book. The future here doesn’t scare me as much as it did in “The Calorie Man,” maybe because having read “The Calorie Man,” it’s not new. That’s not to say the book doesn’t have much new to offer. It does. It’s set farther in the future than “The Calorie Man” and the Midwest agricorps’ gene-rippers are working hard to keep ahead of the mutated horrors they’ve unleashed on the world. While I’m not sure I’d call the “Windup Gir”l the main character (she shares the stage with an agricorp “calorie man”; a “yellow card Chinese,” that is a survivor of the Malaysian purge of the ethnic Chinese now living in Thailand; and a few others), she’s the focal point of a number of the novel’s questions/issues. The Windup Girl herself is a genetically modified, creche-grown “New Person,” a “non-human” human abandoned in Thailand by her Japanese businessman owner because it was cheaper for him to buy a new one in Japan than to ship her back when he returned.
  • The Windup Girl won the 2009 Nebula Award, was a 2009 Hugo Award nominee, and was listed by Time as 9th best novel of 2009. That’s 9th best fiction book, not science fiction book, mind you. It’s not too long ago that  science fiction would not have made such a list simply because it was science fiction.
  • As I said, The Windup Girl is set in the same future as Bacigalupi’s short story “The Calorie Man.” Also set in that future is his story “The Yellow Card Man.” Night Shade Books will let you download and read both for free. Look for the Paolo Bacigalupi’s Windup Stories link or get a hold of his short story collection Pump Six and Other Stories. [Pump Six is currently out of print, but you can buy an electronic version in a variety of formats from html and PDF to iBook/Nook/Kindle/Rocketbook/Microsoft Reader. That’s how I got my copy. :)]

Transmetropolitian, Warren Ellis et. al.

  • A great series from the DC Vertigo imprint (which Hellblazer, The Swamp Thing, and The Sandman also belong) that follows the return of 23rd century outlaw gonzo journalist Spider Jerusalem to the City and to journalism. Imagine Hunter S. Thompson in a 23rd century cyberpunk America.
  • The one big problem I have with Hellblazer is that it is an ongoing series. I’ve thought about getting a subscription, but that would entail tracking down past issues not yet collected in graphic novel form, reading it piece-meal, and then buying the graphic novels when they’re released. What I’ve chosen to do instead is wait until each author finishes their run as each has an overall story arc in addition to the individual stories and smaller multi-issue stories. I know, I’m not a good comic book reader in this sense, but I’d rather read each arc at one time as a complete story. Transmet, on the other hand, is a completed series with 11 volumes, all written by Ellis. Only, volume 8 is out of print and won’t be rereleased until September, so I’m waiting. I spent $35 to buy an out of print Hellblazer that has no advertised rerelease date, but I’m not going to spend $60 for a Transmet volume I can get in a few months. If there wasn’t a scheduled rerelease date, I’d break down and buy it. Yes, Transmetropolitian is that good.

Conceptual Blending and Metaphor

17 Thursday Jun 2010

Posted by in Cognitive Studies, Memory, Probes, Quotes, Reading

≈ 3 Comments

[I ought to have a category label “my cognitive turn.” You might call this part of the series “My Adventures in Cognitive Linguistics, Cognitive Rhetoric, and Cognitive Poetics” that began with “My Cognitive (Re)Turn.”]

conceptual blend diagramI’ve read a fair amount of books and articles on blending, a topic with which I seem to have, metaphorically speaking, a “tip of the tongue” relationship. I understand it and understand how it describes the cognitive processes behind various mnemonic practices I’m interested in, but I have a hard time explaining it. Sort of. I mean, I can explain it and do so in such a way that people seem to understand what I’m talking about, but, at the same time, I feel like I don’t get it. Maybe my problem is with diagramming blends beyond something simple such as the diagram on the right, taken from Mark Turner’s “Blending and Conceptual Integration” page and used in a number of publications authored and co-authored by him.1 Any way, having read a fair amount of this stuff, I thought I’d post a good, succinct definition of conceptual blending or conceptual integration since I always find myself rereading to assure myself I’m not missing something:

Blending is a process of conceptual mapping and integration that pervades human thought. A mental space is a small conceptual packet assembled for purposes of thought and action. A mental space network connects an array of mental spaces. A conceptual integration network is a mental space network that contains one or more “blended mental spaces.” A blended mental space is an integrated space that receives input projections from other mental spaces in the network and develops emergent structure not available from the inputs. Blending operates under a set of constitutive principles and a set of governing principles. [From Mark Turner’s “Blending and Conceptual Integration” page.]

Gilles Fauconnier, co-developer of conceptual blending and frequent collaborator with Turner, explains that “the essence of the operation is to construct a partial match between input mental spaces and to project selectively from those inputs into a novel ‘blended’ space” (1).2 Actually, in contemplating this, I think I struggle with identifying the generic space as well. But I’m getting a head of my self here. Let’s back up and I’ll provide a concrete example of a blend and explain it in terms of the diagram.

I think I first encountered the theory of blending in Turner’s The Literary Mind. One example was the anthropomorphic personification of Death, the scythe-carrying hooded skeleton. This representation of Death, Turner explained, is a blend that emerged out of agrarian medieval Europe. Mental spaces provide for us the inputs from which the blend emerges. In this case, Turner suggests, we have clerical class and their clothing, particularly monks, from which we get the cowl and scapular; dead and decayed bodies, from which we get the skeleton; and harvesting, from which we get the scythe. So, for this blend, we have three mental spaces providing three inputs. The generic space, if I had to guess, is death/end of life. Clergy, Turner explains, are connected to death because of funerals, funeral processions, and praying for the dead. I assume I don’t need to explain the connection dead bodies and the harvest have to death. 🙂 Okay, so, the three input mental spaces (medieval clergy, dead bodies, harvest) selectively project into our new blended mental space, the concept of an anthropomorphic personification of Death (aka Grim Reaper) that functions as a harvester of souls.

If this sounds similar to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s theory of conceptual metaphor, that’s because it is.3 Both emerge out of cognitive linguistics and serve as evidence for embodied cognition. Traditionally, while rhetoric and poetic have regarded metaphor as a special use of language, these theories argue that metaphor underlies all thought to such an extent that we don’t recognize most thought as metaphorical. From the places and images mnemonic and the cognitive images of monastic rhetoric to understanding how social memory functions rhetorically—to say nothing of database rhapsody—metaphor has its tentacles throughout my scholarship. My pedagogy too.

I’m scared of metaphor.

I’m scared of metaphor because I could become lost in it. I could just dive into the study of metaphor and never return to anything else. I also ind myself flailing around until I go cross-eyed and develop a headache when I try to read some of the more complex theories of metaphor. So, metaphor scares me. For me, studying metaphor is a studying a black hole. No matter how close I might get drawn to into it, there’s an event horizon I dare not cross, only, the closer in I go, the more strongly it pulls me in and that damn event horizon isn’t clearly marked at all. So I’m scared of metaphor.

Today I decided I needed to delve in again by reading Paul Ricoeur’s “The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling” (Critical Inquiry 5.1 (1978: 143-159), an article I’ve been avoiding for a few years now.4 Good stuff. What I found most interesting about this article is that Ricoeur sets the stage for the work of Turner, Lakoff, Johnson, and Fauconnier. Ricoeur, writing in 1978, demonstrates the inadequacies of traditional theories of metaphor and concludes that “there is a structural analogy between cognitive, the imaginative, and the emotional components of the complete metaphorical act […]” (159). The theories of blending and conceptual metaphor and other related concepts provide the cognitive model Ricoeur argues we needed.

  1. Truth be told, I never been able to do more than diagram a simple sentence, so maybe it’s diagramming and not blending I have a problem with. [↩]
  2. From his presentation “Conceptual Integration,” available online as part of the proceedings of the 2001 Workshop Emergence and Development of Embodied Cognition. [↩]
  3. See Lakoff and Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By and Lakoff’s Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things [↩]
  4. Avoiding, of course, because I’m scared Ricoeur might be an event horizon. [↩]